I recently saw a great presentation by Leland Rechis (@Leland, worked with Twitter in Japan and Google on Android) at Huge in a UPA series event called "Put your iPhone down: Discussion About the State of Mobile Services.”

This talk did even more to convince me that developers, media companies, and brands need to be looking beyond the iPhone and applications moving into 2010.  We all know there will be a lot of new android devices in market on Sprint, T-mobile and Verizon, but what this talk drove home was the flexibility of the Android platform over the iPhone.

The Dark Side of the iPhone
We’ve all heard the accolades on the iPhone user experience but we don’t realize that the architecture behind it economizes energy and data usage by putting activities into app silos and pre-sets the activities you can initiate for their apps. For example, when you take a picture you can either 1) email, 2) assign to a contact, or 3) use as wallpaper.  But if you think about it, the best mobile experience would enable you to take a photo and pull up whichever service has the capability to post. Android can generically say 'share' and pull up any application on the phone that has sharing capabilities (email, MMS, Twitter app, Facebook, Tumblr, Flckr, etc.)

That really makes the picture of the three suggested options of what to do with a photo on iPhone look pretty silly.  Android uses a flexible, generic system called ‘Intents’  to have one application call another and perform a specific activity (e.g. message posting, photo sharing or link shortening) without fully loading the app. I believe that once users are enlightened with Android’s flexibility, they will start to use activities like posting to Twitter in utilities like the camera, video player and the mobile browser, and therefore will not need to open separate apps to perform most of the social networking functions that we feel require leaving the camera or browser to perform today.

Building a Better Browser
2009 has clearly been the year of the app but soon we are going to see a shift back to the browser.  It has all been said before but between platform disparity, app store overcrowding, and monetization challenges, developers will drift back to the browser.  Already HTML 5 offers amazing functionality with Geo-Location.  When I asked Leland what’s next, he said it's 'app store' and clarified, 'not THE app store, but application data storage' for the mobile browser.  This is why Apple and Google who initially worked together in their contribution to the webkit standard mobile browser are now competing to create the fastest and best JavaScript engines.

With faster JavaScript and data storage capabilities on mobile, you can make data animate and make AJAX interface design capabilities, such as we’ve seen on the Google Latitude maps which run on the iPhone mobile website. More emphasis on application data storage for faster JavaScript and the introduction of Flash in 2010 will make a difference toward emphasizing the one feature of the mobile browser that apps inherently struggle with…no download required.